Emerald theme

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Make Emerald themes to go along with each theme. This is very, very low
priority, because GTK Window Decorator is perfectly sufficient, although
Emerald is much more customizable.

I might get on making some for each theme, if you want.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by claysmal...@gmail.com on 23 Jun 2009 at 4:06

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I've decided to do this myself. I've got some ideas already.

Original comment by claysmal...@gmail.com on 23 Jun 2009 at 4:38

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There used to be emeralds shipped with shiki not too long ago, but they were 
dropped
as we simply don't need them. The main advantage of emerald is anti-aliasing of
corners, but shiki doesn't have rounded corners (and the ones on top are too 
dark for
any aliasing to be noticeable). Metacity also allows for inheriting the theme's
background colors and has better, more customizable shadows than the emeralds 
did.

Also, with the creation of the XFWM's, emerald was simply not needed.

You can, however, feel free to create or customize emeralds or shiki itself to 
your
liking, redistribute, release or do as you please. It's an open source project, 
after
all ;)

If you want a starting point, perhaps you can google for an older version of 
Shiki
that contains the old emeralds. That way it might be easier than creating a new 
one
from scratch.

Original comment by perfectska04 on 23 Jun 2009 at 5:02

• Changed state: WontFix
• Added labels: Priority-Low, Type-Enhancement
• Removed labels: Priority-Medium, Type-Defect

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Thanks, that'll help.

Original comment by claysmal...@gmail.com on 23 Jun 2009 at 5:50

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I can't find any old shiki packages. Do you still have them on your computer or 
anything?

Original comment by claysmal...@gmail.com on 23 Jun 2009 at 9:08

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Sorry, I don't. The emeralds were dropped many months ago, so I don't have any 
copies
of them.

They were based on the dark version of my very old gommoso-colors emeralds, so
perhaps you can use those as a base. You should just have to remove the borders,
adjust the shadows and the stripe colors to have pretty much the same thing.

http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Gommoso-Colors?content=78091

Original comment by perfectska04 on 23 Jun 2009 at 10:38

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I have it pretty much done, but I changed the font by accident and I can't 
remember
it. What's the default font and size for Gnome Colors?

Original comment by claysmal...@gmail.com on 24 Jun 2009 at 2:06

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Oh, wait, never mind. Is it DejaVu Sans Bold 8?

Original comment by claysmal...@gmail.com on 24 Jun 2009 at 2:08

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Yes, it's that same font. It's the one that Arc uses, and Bold is recommended 
for the
metacity in order to have consistency with the panel's bold elements.

Original comment by perfectska04 on 24 Jun 2009 at 2:45

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I have two Emerald themes in releasable condition! Yay! Although you may have 
to do
some minor editing to the metadata, because I may have those in a wrong format 
or
something. I don't know the guidelines for those. But it shouldn't be much of a 
problem.

Also, I'm interested in maintaining the Emerald themes. May I join the project?

Original comment by claysmal...@gmail.com on 24 Jun 2009 at 2:49

Attachments:

• Gommoso-Colors.emerald
• Gommoso-Dust.emerald

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I haven't seen it yet, I'm on my laptop, so I'll do that once I get home. 
However,
you think it looks good and it can be of use to anyone who for some reason 
doesn't
like metacity or xfwm, you can upload it to gnome-look.org as "emerald for
shiki-colors" or something similar :)

Original comment by perfectska04 on 24 Jun 2009 at 10:00

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It's on Gnome Look now.
http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Gommoso-Colors?content=107481

Original comment by claysmal...@gmail.com on 24 Jun 2009 at 11:47

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Thanks, I was just trying it out.

It looks pretty good, although there are few things you could improve... For 
example,
the active font would match better with the buttons if it was #E6E6E6. The 
inactive
font can be set to 100% opacity, since the color already matches the inactive 
buttons.

Other than that, I would make all the borders 2px, as it's the best compromise
between thin borders and easy resizing.

That's it for the design. There's something else that you might want to look 
into -
emerald has a really nasty shadow bug (I know because I encountered it often 
when I
used to make emerald themes) when borders are small. If you set your background 
to
complete white, look at the upper right part of the window and you'll see that 
the
shadows change from really dark into a really transparent, so it looks really 
bad.

Your theme also suffers from this, but if I remember how to fix it, the 
following
should work:

1. Set shadow color to #000000
2. Set window borders to 2px or 3px all across.
3. Make opacity 0.85.
4. Important: Make the "Radius" 6.9. I don't know why, but this is the highest 
radius
I could manage without making the emerald shadow bug appear.

After that, your theme should be really good looking. You might just want to 
play
around with the gradients and transparencies until you're satisfied and you've 
got
yourself a very neat emerald theme - much better than my old gommoso ones.

Original comment by perfectska04 on 25 Jun 2009 at 12:00

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I might not be able to maintain this anymore. My father recently lost his job, 
so
because of cost, we might have to downgrade to dial-up internet (blech) in the 
near
future in the worst-case scenario. I feel so stupid for breathing life back 
into a
project, then immediately abandoning it.

Original comment by claysmal...@gmail.com on 27 Jun 2009 at 3:40

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Hey, don't worry about it. Life challenges matter more than window decoration 
challenges.

If anything, you already provided the community with a solid emerald 
alternative to
the shiki-colors metacity. It'll be there in gnome-look for everyone to use, 
and I
bet it'll continue to work as is for a long time, since emerald code hasn't 
really
changed all that much in the past two years.

Original comment by perfectska04 on 27 Jun 2009 at 3:55

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If nothing, I'll get a feeling of accomplishment if it gets included into the 
PPA.
Though I don't know if you have any control over that.

Original comment by claysmal...@gmail.com on 27 Jun 2009 at 5:11

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No, he has no control over the PPA. The gnome-colors-packagers group is 
responsible
for that. Currently Andrew Starr-Bochicchio and I are members of this group.

Please add an AUTHOR, ChangeLog and COPYING file. Please add an version to the
tarball (preferred call it name-version.tar.gz).

It would be nice, if you host the theme somewhere else, too, so you can keep 
all old
versions. There are many places like Launchpad or Google Code.

Original comment by benjamin.drung on 27 Jun 2009 at 2:10

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There's a better version along with a changelog at
http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Gommoso-Colors?content=107481 and the 
themes
are released under the GPL.

Although I don't know what the AUTHOR file should be. I'll repost here once I 
gather
up some attachments.

Original comment by claysmal...@gmail.com on 27 Jun 2009 at 4:52

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They really don't require anything, but they should recommend "emerald".

Original comment by claysmal...@gmail.com on 27 Jun 2009 at 5:28

Attachments:

• Gommoso-Colors-4.1.tar.gz
• Gommoso-Dust-4.1.tar.gz